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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28359786">In the End (It Doesn't Even Matter)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/ElectricKettle'>ElectricKettle (DaLaRi)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>15.18, 15.20, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Canon Compliant, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:01:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,488</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28359786</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/ElectricKettle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean was never going to be able to say it. That doesn't mean that his love doesn't crack him nearly in two.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel/Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>In the End (It Doesn't Even Matter)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'm allergic to not being earnest about the media I've loved over the years. I cared a lot about Supernatural during a time in my life when I really needed something to care a lot about. It was not a good show, and it was not kind to either its viewers or its characters. But I had to give it a send-off, in its way, and this is what that is.</p><p>Also, the ending confession was the most homophobic way to make destiel canon, and I'm going to be mad about it, viscerally, forever.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the end, it was the silence that undid them. The years of silence, of not acting, of biding their time because they knew their awful little orbit around each other was all they were ever going to get. In the end, it was Cas, speaking into existence the possibility that had threatened like tears since the beginning of them knowing each other that killed him, erased him, and finished Dean too. To have the words wrenched from Dean’s throat in bas relief meant that the knowledge that it was only <em>ever</em> going to be one of them that was able to say it was etched deep into him like writing on his ribs. That Cas <em>knew</em>, had likely known for years how Dean felt, and had stepped into the void to protect Dean because he loved Dean too, it gutted him more completely than any pale sensation his body had left in it.</p><p>He had grieved Cas before. Many, many times. More times than anyone except maybe Sam, but that was fuzzy and it was different. Cas had been with him for over a decade, at his side, gruffness and social ineptness and effusiveness and piss-poor decision-making skills, and dean felt like a ghost without him. He had leaned on Cas, and he was gone.</p><p>Grief made him stupid. He knew this, and he had thought he’d known grief before, and he had thought he’d known stupid before, but the way his brain shut down, the shape of Cas’s mouth around the words, just him this time, it was a brand as sure as the bloody handprint and the memories. He had said he loved Dean before, looked away but spoken to him, played chicken with confession and been unable to face it. He had died in front of Dean before. None of this was new. He should know, deep in his heart, that Cas was coming back. He was family, and family didn’t give up on each other. But the world was so damn cruel to them, and Cas had confessed his love to Dean, and Dean hadn’t said anything back. And that was just, in the logic of this world. And Dean knew an ended when it clicked into place. He had looked the moment in the face, felt each heartbeat of it as it passed, and said nothing. And if he lived the moment again a thousand times, he would have done the same again.</p><p>Because contrary to what Cas thought, Dean wasn’t anything more than a person. Cas was the one angel in a million versions of himself who had chosen the ability to love over his created purpose to obey. And Dean, he had never made any claims to be the person that could inspire that. But he had become it, bit by bit, death by death, reunion by reunion. He had become the person Cas wanted to see, expected to see, loved to see. And he’d flourished. But he’d only ever really been built for skirmishing. And with God truly and genuinely set against him, what chance had he ever had? For all that Cas made him feel special, he never had been. He had just been the person Cas had happened to fall in love with. It could have been Sam, it could have been anybody. And under the weight and the steel of the love of a millennia-old angel, who wouldn’t have risen to that challenge?</p><p>Sam wouldn’t. But Sam hadn’t been so desperate for love that he nearly choked on the lack daily for his entire adult life. Dean had seen Sam grow up loved, truly loved. Sam wouldn’t have loved Cas to desperate distraction, even after all those years. Not in the way that Dean had, to the point of blindness, to the point of pain</p><p>It had been the startling familiarity in the unfamiliar that had gotten him. Being with Cas was the best version of being alone, and Dean had spent so, so much of his life completely alone. Dean was broken and brittle and unreasonable and stubborn and proud and Cas was all of those things just as much, just buried under a several-thousand-year-old act of pretending to be okay. They fit weirdly and badly and angrily and codependently at times, but they fit, and Dean had locked himself into a prison of his own devising by letting himself get twisted up into the kind of person who would never be able to tell Cas he loved him.</p><p>If he had just said something, Cas would have been alive, or at least would have gone to his grave with something to hold on to. Something other than the knowledge that Dean couldn’t say those words back to him. Cas left for the empty on the relief of confession alone, and it was the kind of “it’s really messed up but I’m not okay” that he should have known, <em>had to have known</em> would be the kind that Dean would have shared for ages.</p><p>“You’ve changed me fundamentally and it’s emotionally destroyed me how much I love you” was exactly their brand of BS. Dean would take to his grave how much those words roiled like smoke behind his teeth. He breathed through his locked jaw, and each breath was thicker than the last with loss and shame and resentment and bitter, bitter anger. He could say what he wanted now. It no longer mattered. Silence was the ribbon hiding the place where his head had been cut off.</p><p>Dean Winchester, walking corpse. Dean Winchester, sans Castiel. Who would clean up his messes now? Without divine intervention, were they even worth the attention? Cas had said Dean had changed him, but for so, so long, Cas had been everything that was special about Dean. Insane things could happen to him, yes, but everything that hurt, everything that landed and lasted and changed him for worse or for better was Cas. Cas’s faith in him. Cas the eternal, who would have seen him lose to the Mark. Cas, who had seen humanity rise out of the oceans and decided he liked Dean best. Cas, who was the weirdest person Dean had ever known. Cas, who was gone, and never coming back. Because he’d loved Dean a little too much. A little bit more than the world said he should have.</p><p>Dean was so, so angry at him.</p><p>They should have worked it out. Cas should have kept his mouth shut and given them the time they needed to think of a plan, get out of the danger like they always did, and then they could have gotten drunk and Cas could have told him then, when they were alone and not in danger and then Dean could have railed him into the Impala’s backseat like he’d wanted to do for almost a decade, probably fucking up his back permanently because, as he’d said, he’d wanted to do that for a <em>decade</em>. And they could have worked it out, and Dean could have explained the knot in his throat, and Cas would have understood, because he was broken in those ways too. But instead of any of that, Cas had just left him. Had taken the bullet for Dean without asking <em>again</em>, and left Dean with the guilt and the grief and the lovesickness and the pain of losing him, all because Cas couldn’t stand the agony of being the widower. Well, Dean had been the widower more times than he could count, now, and if this time was the end, truly, he was beyond angry with Cas for denying them the chance to go out fighting it together.</p><p>It sickened him to be this angry at dead gay Cas. Dean was alive and still in love and grieving yet again, but he was also stupid and a coward and too far from anything like rational decision-making to ever do anything that might make this kind of pain stop. He had loved Cas more than anybody he hadn’t been born into loving, and now the asshole was gone. And Dean was alone, and “straight,” and the silence rang and rang and rang and rang.</p><p>He tried to tell Sam how Cas had died. He tried, and he tried again, and again but every time it lodged in him like a bullet, like a seam. He would dissolve under the weight of this if he spoke, so he didn’t and in the end he died and it didn’t even matter. Cas had been beating back the current, but he died and it didn’t even matter at all because Dean was mortal, and the only reason he’d ever tried to live out every human minute was to spare Cas the pain he had chosen for Dean. And so he died embarrassingly, and passed into the next world and didn’t think about how all of it had been in vain.</p>
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